It gets harder every day to imagine a United States with leadership that fosters inclusion and freedom of expression. Against this backdrop, the Obama Presidential Center, an expansive cultural and community hub set to open in Chicago’s Jackson Park on Juneteenth, stands out.
The site will encompass a museum, a library, a fruit and vegetable garden, and an athletic complex. But contemporary art, which will live at the Center as part of its permanent collection, is at the project’s heart. After all, few presidential libraries boast an original Jenny Holzer painting. The conceptual doyenne’s work will share space with a Jack Pierson sculpture, a monumental bronze by Kiki Smith, and an immersive installation by Idris Khan, among other artist commissions.
When Virginia Shore, an independent advisor and curator spearheading the Center’s commissions, reached out to Nick Cave to suggest a joint piece with Marie Watt, the sculptor was hesitant. Not because he was unfamiliar with Watt’s deeply textured pieces, which draw on cornhusks, neon, slate, and dangling tin jingles that nod to the material legacy of the Seneca artist’s culture. In fact, Cave’s own “Soundsuit” series—part wearable sculpture, part ornamental explosion—has often employed sound, movement, and form to reflect on race’s many guises in America. The reason for his hesitation was simple: Cave had never collaborated with another artist like this before, and certainly not on a piece so large and important.
But dialogues—between people, artworks, cultures, interpretations—are what spaces like the Obama Presidential Center are made to embody. “Each of these commissions is a meditation on civic life,” says Louise Bernard, the founding director of the Center’s museum. “From the intimacy of painting to the scale of public sculpture, these works speak to themes at the heart of the Center: resilience, memory, identity, and hope.”
Ahead of the Center’s unveiling, CULTURED sat down with Cave and Watt for an exclusive conversation about their multimedia textile installation—which they assembled in Chicago this February and which will reign over the Center’s lobby. Here, the artists unpack what it means to work together in a time of deep division.
“It’s going to be a dance. But in the end, I hope it looks effortless.” –Marie Watt
How did this dual commission come about?
Nick Cave: Virginia Shore asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a project for the Obama Presidential Center. This is my first time collaborating in this capacity. We really didn’t know each other.
Marie Watt: Collaboration is a big part of my practice, but being paired up with another artist with a specific site is a very new challenge … I had the great fortune of seeing Nick’s show at the Denver Art Museum in 2013, and I instantly fell in love with the tactility of that wall of buttons. I really admire his use of materials.
Nick, which elements of Marie’s work captured your attention?
Cave: I’m crazy about your “Blanket Stories” [large-scale sculptures made from blankets Watt collects from community members, along with stories about the importance of each one]. How did you start making those?
Watt: I’m interested in how blankets are storied objects. That’s something that connects our work—you work with storied materials, too.
Cave: We both have a consciousness of how material is repurposed to elevate stories, to redefine how we understand and approach them. It all made sense in this extraordinary way.
Merging two time-honored practices is complicated. How did you develop a mutual vocabulary and build the trust required to do this?
Cave: We met a number of times—on Zoom and in person.
Watt: Nick is in Chicago, and I am in Portland, Oregon. So in the initial creative stages after meeting, we also shared drawings. The final piece is really going to come together in Chicago, and that’s a little nerve-wracking, but also super exciting.
Cave: It’s all about chemistry. How do we create a sense of harmony and coexistence in a project that we will literally be collaborating on—and assembling—for the first time on-site?
How did those meetings go? How do you get inside one another’s brains?
Cave: Understanding the location was really important, and understanding the scale. At the end of the day, this is not really for us; it’s for the community at large. It’s something that will live forever on the site. We know what must be done.
Watt: We share the same fabricator, so that also has helped with conversations about how the work is going to come together on this 15-by-45-foot wall. Visiting Nick in Chicago and spending time together is also part of the process. Making a connection is about the act of making, but it’s also about being human and learning more about each other.
Cave: How do you build upon a relationship that is new when you also have to depend on each other? That’s the reality here. I have to trust her 100 percent. She has to trust me 100 percent. I’m very much looking forward to install day. I know we are going to walk away with a spectacular project.
“We both have a consciousness of how material is repurposed to elevate stories, to redefine how we understand and approach them.” –Nick Cave
You two were photographed for this story in the studio of late Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt. How has he informed the project?
Cave: I knew Richard for years and have spent lots of time in his studio. Just being in that space and feeling the magnitude of his impact in art history and in Chicago was an amazing moment to reflect on a person who paved the way for us both. To be in his workspace felt very sacred.
Watt: Spending time in Richard’s studio emphasizes what the Center will be. It’s this dynamic space that exists to connect generations.
What do you want this work to say?
Cave: With the title of the work, This Land, Shared Sky, I was thinking about Woody Guthrie’s song, “This Land Is Your Land.” I was thinking about how this land has been crossed by many—a place where migration happened, where you moved from the South to the North for a better life. This idea of a rite of passage. A land of opportunity.
I started to think about how our land tries continuously to bury our history. It’s about the gaze, to enter the space and travel from the ground floor to the top floor, and take the work in with amazement and reflection.
Watt: When I thought of our title, I knew I was going to use these tin jingles in the sculpture. At some point in our conversations about the piece, I started to think about these twinning gestures. I was thinking a lot at the time about the word “mother.” I come from a matrilineal society; I think of the word “mother” as it relates to earth and the planet, and I have a deep connection to my mother. The idea also stemmed from an interest in Marvin Gaye’s anthem “What’s Going On”—and the lyric “mother, mother” in that song. It’s connected to this history of call and response, acknowledging our ancestors and acting as a bridge connecting them to future generations.
The other thing for me is material. The tin jingle has a strong connection to the Midwest and Great Lakes region. The jingle dress originated with the Anishinaabe community. It came about during a pandemic, but that pandemic was influenza. There was a very sick girl, and her father had a dream that he was instructed to attach tin jingles to a dress, and that their sound would help heal this child. We know the medicine works because that dance was shared with other Indigenous communities. It’s still considered a healing dance today.
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